Gary Haynes - State Of Honour

The small white Fiat came screeching around the corner with four masked men inside. His cover was that of an aid worker from Chicago and he wasn’t strapped. But now he wished he had a weapon, if only to have the option of ending it before they took him. He knew what that would mean. The torture first, followed by the years of solitary. Then his corpse would be lifted from the trunk of a car and thrown into a drainage ditch. By the time it was found, the insects would’ve had a feast and his mother would have nightmares, because the authorities would not allow her to see his face when they flew his body home.

He didn’t run, because the only place to run was back the way he’d come, and a second vehicle had already stopped halfway through a three-point turn, all but blocking off the street.

They exited the Fiat fast. He was fit and trained, but he knew they’d only make it worse for him in the close confines of the car if he fought them. There was a time for that and a time for raising your hands, he’d learned. He took an instep hard in the groin, and a cosh over the back of his head as he doubled over. He blacked out then.

The makeshift cell Hezbollah had kept him in in Lebanon was a bare concrete room, three metres square, without windows or artificial light. The door was wooden, reinforced with iron strips. When they first dragged him there, he lay in the filth that other men had made. They left him naked, his wrists and ankles chained. He was gagged with rag and tape. They had broken his nose and split his lips.

Each day they fed him on half-rancid scraps like he’d seen people toss to skinny dogs. He drank only tepid water. Occasionally, he heard the muted sound of children laughing, and smelt a faint waft of jasmine. And then he could not say for certain how long he had been there; a month, maybe two. But his muscles had wasted and he ached in every joint. After they had said their morning prayers, they liked to hang him upside down and beat the soles of his feet with sand-filled lengths of rubber hose. His chest was burned with foul-smelling cigarettes. When he was stubborn, they lay him bound in a narrow structure shaped like a grow tunnel in a dusty courtyard. The fierce sun blazed upon the corrugated iron for hours, and he would pass out with the heat. When he woke up, he had blisters on his skin, and was riddled with sand fly and red ant bites.

The duo were good at what they did. He guessed the one with the grey beard had honed his skills on Jewish conscripts over many years, the younger one on his own hapless people, perhaps. They looked to him like father and son. They took him to the edge of consciousness before easing off and bringing him back with buckets of fetid water. Then they rubbed jagged salt into the fresh wounds to make him moan with pain. They asked the same question over and over until it sounded like a perverse mantra.

“Who is The Mandarin? His name? Who is The Mandarin?”

He took to trying to remember what he looked like, the architecture of his own face beneath the scruffy beard that now covered it, and found himself flinching at the slightest sound. They had peeled back his defences with a shrewdness and deliberation that had both surprised and terrified him.

By the time they freed him, he was a different man.

The Ariana Hotel was in the Diplomatic Quarter, Kabul, near the US Embassy and the Presidential Palace. But it hadn’t been open to the public for well over a decade. The former hotel still housed the headquarters of the CIA in Afghanistan. The compound and the roads around it were some of the most heavily protected in the capital, following a day-long siege by insurgents in September 2011. Crane had grinned and had told Tom that to the average Afghan, the quarter was as inaccessible as a Playboy Bunny.

“It’s still off-limits to the local cops,” he said as they rode past a checkpoint with huge cement bollards in an adapted Land Cruiser. “For how long, who the hell knows these days?”

The boxlike, cream-coloured structure looked run-down. Tom saw more than three dozen armed guards on the perimeter, together with mobile rocket launchers. Two IAV Strykers, eight-wheeled, armoured fighting vehicles fitted with M2 .50-cal machine guns, were parked either side of the main gate.

“You’re not taking any chances, that’s for sure,” he said.

“Yeah, but looks are deceiving.”

“The Taliban breach this?” Tom asked.

“Green on blue nightmares. You can’t trust anyone in an Afghan uniform. And on the streets it’s worse than ever. We’ve lost a total of fifty-two core collectors since the military pulled out; fifteen in the last month alone. We stopped making that official a year back. You know, Tom, more people are killed coming down off a mountain than ascending it. Leaving an occupied country ain’t no different. They held off for a while there. To encourage us, I figure. But now they want as many dead as possible. I give it maybe three years before even what’s left of us are gone for good.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I think.”

“You still got your gun on you?”

“Yeah. You want me to hand it in?” Tom asked.

“You’re a special agent, ain’t ya? You just keep it close. A SIG?”

“Standard-issue.”

“I favour the Kimber Eclipse Custom II,” Crane said, easing the handgun out of his shoulder holster and weighing it in his hand. “Now that barrel alone is five inches, but it’s a .45 ACP and is fitted with these here low-profile night-sights,” he went on, fingering the back of the gun where the sights were mounted in rounded dovetails. “And it’s only a four-pound trigger pull. I got it in 10mm, too, and that’ll take a man’s head clean off.”

“A good piece,” Tom said. “But mine allows an easy draw.”

“You wanna hold it?”

“I’m fine.”

“Suit yourself,” Crane said, holstering it. He took out a slim cigar from his jacket pocket, lit it with a gold lighter. “You smoke, Tom?”

Tom shook his head. He looked at Crane. He took a long pull on the cigar before puffing little smoke rings out of the open window. He was a strange kind of guy.

Twenty minutes later, Tom was feeling frustrated that nothing positive seemed to be happening. He found himself at another intelligence briefing in another secure conference room, although the security had been ratcheted up several notches. He’d had to show a laminated badge to a Marine outside the shockproof door, who’d checked his name off on a clipboard list, and had noticed that the plaster had been replaced by lead-lined walls to eradicate the threat from electronic listening devices.

Crane and Deputy Director Houseman were present, together with half a dozen CIA analysts, a couple of high-ranking US Army officers, and a lieutenant in the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, or Delta Force, called Mark Sawyer. He was a troop commander in B Squadron, a six-foot blond with a boyish nose and neat little ears, eyes the colour of cornflower.

B Squadron contained seventy-five operators split into three troops, which were in turn made up of teams of five. It was stationed at Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina. The Delta Force squadrons, together with SEAL Team 6, made up the direct action and reconnaissance element of the tier-one Special Missions Unit of the US Armed Forces. Sawyer’s troop was on standby on the off chance something happened in the next day or two. They’d been training Afghan Special Forces as part of the US commitment to assisting the country’s security services following the official withdrawal, which Tom felt was the only piece of good luck that had happened so far.

Like the façade, the interior of the Ariana wasn’t exactly five star, but it had modern facilities and was clean. Apart from the flat-screens and the ubiquitous blue tiles, the basement conference room had a large moulded-plastic table and chairs. It was lit by fluorescent strips, which had added a clinical aspect to what had started as a frosty meeting. Tom knew it was the way when different departments with ultimately competing budgets had to get something done together, the continuing US debt crisis just making that dynamic more acute. But gradually everyone put aside their differences and concentrated on the clear-cut task of getting the secretary home safely, although they had nothing material to go on as yet.